Utility customers receive a thick stack of mail and other communications every year from their energy provider, about 40 pieces in total. One needs to ask: is 40 pieces really the optimal number?

It’s unlikely.

Not to say that customers don’t want to hear from their utility. In fact, 75 percent of customers still want to hear more from their utility. However, they aren’t looking for more communications — they’re looking for better communications. Communications that are well-timed, more personalized, easier to act upon, and delivered via the right channel.

But, it’s easier said than done. Identifying the times, offers, and channels that work best for customers can be a difficult task for utilities.

Fortunately, predictive analytics — similar to those used by Netflix and Amazon to make personalized recommendations to customers — can help demystify customers for utilities.

A powerful application of this approach can be found in America’s favorite pastime: baseball. For years, the Oakland Athletics used predictive analytics to identify undervalued baseball players and assemble a better, more cost-effective team. The well-documented strategy — also known as Moneyball — was so groundbreaking that Brad Pitt portrayed Oakland general manager Billy Beane in the story’s adaptation for the silver screen.

While utilities certainly aren’t fielding a baseball team, they have an opportunity to use predictive analytics and win over their customers: by tailoring communications to specific customer needs and desires. And not just with basic customer data like name, monthly energy usage, and demographic information — but also with other key variables that are less obvious, but equally as powerful.

Advances in data analytics and automation technology mean that utilities don’t have to be generic anymore. In the 21st century, they can be a leader alongside other innovative tech and retail companies by customizing communications based on people’s unique attributes: hourly power usage patterns, thermostat temperature preferences, online engagement levels, mobile channel adoption, and interactions with utility call centers.

Why are these types of analytics so valuable to the utility customer experience? Because in one way or another, the approach is rooted in the reality of past customer behavior.

By gaining a more accurate understanding of a customer’s past behavior, utilities can better gauge their propensity to participate in utility programs and take advantage of specific offerings — like demand response, community solar, and new rate plans. That in turn allows utilities to segment customers based on their specific characteristics, and target timely communications (e.g. high bill alerts, solar offerings, etc.) to the customers that are most likely to act, rather than sending generic communications that are often discarded.

Of course, correctly segmenting customers and delivering timely, automated insights can’t happen without the right technology.

That’s where the Opower 6 platform comes into play. It gives utilities a proven, cost-effective method to perform all the necessary steps to make smarter communications a reality, from analytics to automation to delivery.

Plugged into a platform that’s adaptively built upon the world’s largest collection of energy data — spanning more than 350 billion meter reads and hundreds of customer attributes — utilities are positioned to better understand customer behavior, segment them based on unique attributes, and deliver communications and offerings that are more personalized than ever before.

That not only leads to happier customers and more cost-effective utility operations — it’s also a lot less junk mail.

To learn more about how predictive analytics can help utilities sharpen their customer experience, check out this recent blog post.

Last week, Opower welcomed more than 300 utility leaders to Miami Beach for PowerUp — our annual utility innovation summit. We announced new products, shared our roadmap, and spotlit partners who are using our platform to transform their customer relationships.

In case you couldn’t make it, these were nine moments from the conference that really mattered.

PowerUp started with a bang. In their opening keynote, Dan Yates and Alex Laskey unveiled the newest, most powerful version of the Opower platform — which analyzes more than 100 billion meter reads a year, behavioral patterns from more than 50 million utility customers, and data streams spanning call center interactions to thermostat setpoints. Opower 6 will use those inputs to drive a wide variety of new business outcomes for our utility partners around the world.

More than 95 utilities have used behavioral efficiency and behavioral demand response to change the way their customers use energy. At PowerUp, we announced a new set of tools to help our partners take their DSM programs even further.

Inside Opower will give utilities a crystal-clear window into their program successes and more control over their program content. Home Energy Report recipients will get a fresh set of experiences. And new software for segmentation and targeting will open up unprecedented opportunities to personalize the customer experience.

Dan and Alex closed their keynote with a big reveal. By leveraging the same core competencies that has helped people save 6 billion kilowatt-hours of energy, Opower is extending its efforts to tackle a new challenge: helping utilities take better care of their customers.

Why? Because utility-customer interactions still have room for improvement. Most customers still have a hard time understanding their electricity bills, unsatisfying experiences with call centers, and low awareness of what programs their utilities have to offer.

Globally, utilities spend $30 billion every year on customer operations. Our Customer Care solution will help them get more bang for their buck.

In Miami, Puget Sound Energy became the first utility to adopt the Billing Suite — our first Customer Care offering. PSE’s VP for Customer Solutions, Jason Teller, explained why. “PSE is embarking on a multi-year strategy to improve each customer touch point. We have worked with Opower since 2008 to engage customers in order to meet our energy efficiency goals. We are excited to extend our partnership with them to inject personalized insights into other touch points such as unusual usage alerts, seasonal readiness, and eBills to drive energy efficiency program participation and increase customer satisfaction.”

Toward the end of day one, our user experience and behavioral marketing experts gave PowerUp a crash course in behavioral design — equipping everyone with a toolkit of basic behavioral science principles, then turning them loose on a challenging behavioral science problem. Teams of utility leaders developed and shared their best ideas for inspiring residential water conservation. And everyone picked up some tips they can bring back to their day jobs.

From Coke to Amazon, companies worldwide are finding that greater personalization drives more sales. Nancy Hersh, Opower’s VP of Analytics, shared an example from her own life.

“The first time you log onto wine.com, you see a selection of popular, entry-level wines that cost around $10. Up until this point, you were an unengaged user — so wine.com eases you in.

“Over time, you start learning more about wine. So you get interested in bottles that might cost a little more. Wine.com starts recommending higher-level wines, in the $20 to $30 range.

“I have a taste for wine. When I log on, wine.com looks at my personal history and suggests something in the neighborhood of $50 to $150.”

The benefits are real. By giving customers personalized recommendations, wine.com achieved a 15 percent increase in order value and drove $5 per click on recommended wines. The broader takeaway — that companies should segment their customers not just by who they are, but by what they’ve done in the past — matters more than ever for utilities. Nancy went on to explain how previous behavior is a far better predictor of future actions (like enrolling in a utility program) than demographic or psychographic data.

PowerUp is all about helping utilities connect with their customers at moments that matter — including large-scale commercial and industrial customers. Swap Shah, CEO of FirstFuel, shared how his company is using a deep analytics platform to help Southern California Edison engage businesses. And as SCE’s Christine Evans explained, Opower and FirstFuel are helping her utility deliver a seamless, end-to-end customer engagement solution that benefits consumers and SCE alike.

This summer, utilities from California and Michigan to Maryland and Vermont used Behavioral Demand Response to curb peak demand on the hottest days of the year. It was a huge success: energy savings climbed as high as 5 percent, without a single price or device.

Our utility partners aren’t the only ones who like BDR. Their customers do too. In a poll, 78 percent of homes that participated said they were satisfied with the experience. And as Jim Merriam (Efficiency Vermont) and Heather Anderson (Baltimore Gas and Electric) pointed out, you usually can’t get that many people to agree on anything. Just 75 percent say they like ice cream, and 64 percent say they like the beach.

We were proud to welcome more than 300 of the world’s leading utility innovators to Miami last week. But not everyone could make it. So at PowerUp, Dan and Alex announced SyncUp — a year-long series of regional summits for our utility partners.

You’ll hear more from us about SyncUps soon. We look forward to seeing you on the road!

On the second day of Opower’s annual innovation summit in Miami, the spotlight shone brightly on the industry pioneers who are leading the way in revolutionizing the utility customer experience.

After a big morning announcement about Opower’s new Customer Care solution and new platform technology offerings, attention soon turned to our utility partners who shared their unique perspectives on better engaging customers.

The first session was a discussion featuring National Grid’s Jim Madej (SVP, Customer Energy Solutions), Phil Austen (Director, Program Strategy for New York), Carlos Nouel (Director, Alliance and Vendor Strategy), and Opower president Alex Laskey on developing a strategic path forward for utilities in the 21st century.

The conversation shed light on a broad range of efforts to modernize the U.S. electricity grid and redefine the utility business model. One example mentioned during the panel was the New York Public Service Commission’s proposal last year to “Reform the Energy Vision.” The plan, colloquially referred to as “REV,” paints an ambitious vision of a customer-centric energy system that goes well-beyond the industry’s historic role of providing gas and electricity, and instead prioritizes advanced objectives like energy efficiency, demand response, and distributed generation.

While these types of efforts certainly pose a significant challenge to utilities — they also represent a game-changing opportunity to leverage new technology that better engages customers.

Building on this theme, Brian Rich — VP and CIO of Michigan’s largest utility, Consumers Energy — presented on how state-of-the-art analytics and new information technology can help meet climbing customer expectations while also strengthening utilities’ bottom lines.

Brian Rich, VP and CIO at Consumers Energy

At Consumers, Brian is working to deliver a world-class utility customer experience — one evocative of the personalization provided by Amazon and Netflix. By integrating all customer data in a unified platform that employs advanced analytics and delivers automated, personalized communications, Consumers is vastly improving the customer experience while also lowering the utility’s own customer care costs.

This type of customer-centric, data-driven approach is helping drive the utility industry forward not only in the U.S. — but it’s also paying huge dividends for energy providers internationally, like across the pond in Europe.

Anthony Ainsworth — Marketing Director at E.ON UK — one of Europe’s largest energy suppliers — elaborated in a presentation how customer trust can, and must, be regained and strengthened through personalized, digital customer engagement.

Anthony Ainsworth, Director of Sales and Marketing at E.ON UK

After launching the Saving Energy Toolkit in late 2013 — which provides customers with online analysis about their energy use, costs, and comparative usage patterns in their neighborhood — E.ON UK saw its web traffic more than double in a matter of weeks. Now, more than 850,000 unique customers are logging in for personalized energy insights and advice.

Of course, no day would be complete without some cutting-edge insights from Opower’s own experts. Opower’s first-class design team led a hands-on workshop demonstrating how user-centered, behavioral design can help achieve key business outcomes.

Nancy Hersh — Opower’s Vice President of Analytics — added to the conversation by illustrating how predictive analytics can put an end to generic utility communications. By analyzing past customer behavior and determining people’s propensity to take certain future actions (e.g. participating in a demand response program, or installing distributed generation like solar), utilities can send timely and tailored communications that reach the customers most likely to participate in programs and act on specific offers.

Nancy Hersh, VP of Analytics at Opower

PowerUp 2015 is proving to be a truly energizing experience for all attendees — a huge thanks to all of our utility partners and presenters for making this year’s summit one for the books!

Stay tuned for our continuing coverage and be sure to follow @Opower on Twitter for all of the latest insights and updates from Miami.

This morning, our cofounders Dan Yates and Alex Laskey took the stage in Miami Beach to deliver the first keynote of our annual utility innovation summit, PowerUp.

Addressing an audience of more than 300 utility and technology leaders, Dan and Alex revealed Opower 6 — the newest and most advanced version yet of the industry’s most powerful customer engagement platform.

They unveiled an entirely new solution line for Opower’s utility partners, called Customer Care. Presenting key billing-related features of the Customer Care solution, Dan and Alex showcased a set of tools that will breathe new life into the utility industry’s oldest customer touch point.

They also announced new features for our Behavioral Energy Efficiency solution — including dynamic, customizable electronic Home Energy Reports, and fresh experiences for longtime HER recipients.

And finally, they illustrated how the core elements of the Opower 6 platform can drive powerful new solutions — like a web portal built specially for solar customers, complete with personalized net metering data.

Every one of these product innovations advances our vision for a new kind of customer engagement. Together with our clients, we’re building a platform to help utilities transform their customer relationships, and to make the most of key activation points in the utility customer lifecycle.

Over the course of PowerUp, we won’t just highlight where Opower’s going. We’ll let our utility partners lead the way — sharing their challenges, their ideas, their successes, and their vision for the future.

Check back on the Opower blog tomorrow for their stories. And in the meantime, get the inside scoop on the Customer Care solution we’ve been building toward since the beginning.

As an industry, these trends are leading utilities to focus more and more on improving customer service. And rightfully so — it represents a $30 billion per year expense that still has some room for improvement. The question is: can utilities truly reinvent customer service, in a cost-effective way that strengthens the customer relationship and bolsters the bottom line?

At Opower, we think the answer is a resounding “yes.”

By leveraging the same core competency that has helped customers save six billion kilowatt-hours of energy worldwide, we’re now extending our efforts to tackle a new challenge: utility customer service. And today, as part of Opower’s newest technology platform release — Opower 6 — we’re excited to announce our new Customer Care solution.

Understandably, customer service may seem like an unusual move for a company that’s been mostly known for energy efficiency. So, how did we reach this point?

In building out our technology platform that now serves more than 95 utility partners worldwide, we’ve become intimately familiar with industry challenges that run parallel to energy efficiency. Among those challenges, customer service in particular looms large.

The global utility industry currently spends $30 billion each year on customer operations, with a large portion of that spending going toward billing and call centers. Utilities often find themselves putting more than a third of their customer care budget into call center operations alone.

Despite these large investments, however, research shows that utility-customer interactions still have room for improvement: customers have difficulty understanding their electricity bill; they often find call center interactions unsatisfying; they lack awareness of many utility programs.

For more than a year, we’ve worked to develop a Customer Care solution that will help utilities unlock that opportunity and improve their customer experience. Throughout this process, we met with dozens of call center operators and directors; we analyzed troves of call center data that reveal critical moments in the customer lifecycle; and we surveyed thousands of customers worldwide.

This extensive customer research has led to our first Customer Care offering — the Billing Suite — which features timely notices and powerful analytics that allow utilities to breathe new life into the age-old utility bill. The solution is directly supported by a broad set of upgrades to Opower’s industry-leading platform that provides best-in-class tools and analytics to all of our utility partners. In early pilots, this approach has already helped utilities cut high call volumes by as much as 19 percent.

In the coming months, this new solution will roll out to many of our utility partners, with Loveland Water & Power in Colorado and Puget Sound Energy (PSE) in Washington being two of the first providers to revolutionize their customer experience.

To learn more about the key features of Customer Care, upgrades to the Opower 6 platform, and to schedule a demo, visit our solution overview page.

Neel Gulhar is a Director of Product Marketing at Opower. Prior to joining Opower, he led the implementation of smart grid solutions and cutting-edge customer engagement experiences at Baltimore Gas and Electric for 12 years.

]]>http://blog.opower.com/2015/02/opower-6-customer-care/feed/0http://blog.opower.com/2015/02/opower-6-customer-care/Our partners asked for more visibility and more control over their programs. Inside Opower delivers.http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opower/~3/1sqhfxNLyZU/
http://blog.opower.com/2015/02/inside-opower-customer-intelligence/#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 13:00:37 +0000http://blog.opower.com/?p=23183

Since the beginning, our utility partners have been shaping the products we build. As the people who use our platform the most, utility executives and program managers give us essential feedback on what’s working and what’s not. But more than that, they also share their long-term business goals with us — and over time, they help drive our product roadmap.

Just ask Wayne Lin, one of our VPs for Product Management. He spends a lot of time listening to Opower’s clients. “In early 2014, I heard a lot of program managers talking about the pressure they feel when it comes to tracking and reporting on their programs. They were looking for more ways to keep tabs on their progress, and make adjustments along the way.”

That’s how Inside Opower was born.

Inside Opower is an interface that gives utilities a crystal-clear window into their program successes — from energy savings rates to customer website interactions. It also gives program managers more control over their program content. Inside Opower went live in early 2014, and it will be broadly available in March.

Initially, we launched Inside Opower for 10 of our utility partners. They gave us essential feedback on its design and functionality. “We learned a lot,” notes Meghann Lomas, Opower’s Product Manager for Customer Intelligence. “And those lessons are baked into the final product.”

“Our partners were especially excited to see customer-level information in real time — which households logged into the website in the past month, for example, and what actions they took.” Clients also asked for more tools to shape their content, including tips on how to participate in utility programs. “Say your rebate offer changes — program mangers should have tools to tweak content quickly and easily.”

As a result, features like Customer-Level Reports and Tip Manager come standard. And we’ll keep building new tools for Inside Opower to make it even more powerful. Later this year, we’ll give users the option to run ad-hoc analyses that offer unique insights to support their day-to-day strategy and execution.

Our partners asked. Today, Inside Opower delivers.

Read more about the technology behind Opower’s customer intelligence in InformationWeek.

Utilities worldwide are making customer care a top priority. In a lot of ways, that’s a technology challenge. How can energy companies transform their customer data — everything from call center interactions to smart meter reads — into the helpful, personalized information that homes and businesses expect from their utilities?

Chief Information Officers can play a big role in answering that question. We sat down with Brian Rich, VP and CIO of Consumers Energy — Michigan’s largest utility — to learn how. He also shared the five things that every utility executive should do before they start their next IT project.

Opower: Let’s start with the basics. Tell us a little bit about Consumers Energy and what your role is.

Brian Rich: Consumers Energy is Michigan’s largest utility, and the fourth-largest dual fuel utility in the United States. We provide electricity and gas for 6.5 million people, generate nearly 6 megawatts of capacity, and maintain 91,000 miles of distribution lines.

Day to day, I’m leading an IT team that’s 480 people strong. We’re responsible for maintaining and providing reliable technology solutions for Consumers. My team drives some of our company’s key projects, like smart grid upgrades, cybersecurity, and delivering great online experiences for our customers.

O: You started at Consumers fairly recently, right? How’d you end up here?

BR: That’s right. Before this, I spent 13 years at Accenture. Then I moved over to Pacific Gas & Electric in 2010 to help build out their customer care technology. Eventually, I became PG&E’s Vice President for IT. I worked with every line of the business to plan, architect, test, deliver, and support PG&E’s technology solutions — from asset management to customer information systems.

Incidentally, that’s where I first met Opower — though back then, you were a lot smaller, and just beginning to build out your platform. Over the years, Dan and Alex lost a lot of hair, and we worked together to build a beautiful web portal for 5 million of PG&E’s smart meter customers.

O: Besides our executives’ hairlines, has much changed in that time?

BR: Absolutely. We’ve all seen the trends. For a variety of reasons, utilities worldwide are pivoting away from a business model where energy is treated purely as a commodity, and toward one where it’s treated like a set of services. Delivering better customer care is becoming a bedrock part of the business. These changes are new, and they’re real.

A lot has changed from a technical perspective, too. There was a time when utility IT was all about buying and operating huge mainframes. In the 1990s and 2000s, we started partnering with large software companies on long, complex systems implementations.

Now the challenge has evolved again. Where once there were only a few data streams, smart grid technology has created dozens. Smart meters are generating 3000x as much information as conventional meters. As utilities, our job today is about harnessing all that data and turning it into great outcomes for our business and our customers.

O: And that has big ramifications for CIOs like you.

BR: Right. In the past, my role was fairly transactional — the business would come to my team with IT problems, and I’d tell you how to fix them. CIOs were technical experts.

Today, we’re partners. I think of myself as a Chief Orchestrator. I need to know what’s happening in every part of the business, develop technology solutions where they’re necessary, and make sure those solutions are harmonious.

I’m focused on things like data governance, data integration, and data management, which affect pretty much everyone at a utility. At Consumers, we’re spending a lot of time getting all of our technology and our data onto a common platform.

O: A lot of our utility partners are taking a similar approach. What’s the end goal that you’re driving toward?

BR: To deliver world-class customer experiences. And I should point out that that’s a new thing for our industry. For decades, most utilities took a one-size-fits-all approach to customer engagement; everyone’s bill looked the same, and everyone got the same set of offerings. There might have been some demographic segmentation, but it was pretty rudimentary. Utilities didn’t have the tech to deliver personalized experiences.

And that was fine for the most part. But today, it’s not. In a world of Amazons and Netflixes, our customers expect more. Utilities that integrate all their customer data into a unified platform can deliver.

Here’s my vision for customer engagement, which I think Opower shares. Utilities feed data from their IT systems — CIS, MDMS, third-party systems, and so on — into a single platform. They use analytics to get a holistic view of each customer. Then they use that information to communicate in a way that’s both proactive and deeply personalized. As a customer, if I’m on track for a high bill, my utility lets me know and gives me the help I need to keep it down. If I get a new smart meter, my utility sends me an email explaining what it does and why it’s helpful.

That kind of targeting and delivery should be quick and automatic. That way, each customer is getting the right message, at the right time, through the right channel. It’s a great experience for them, and as a utility, we save money by running a smarter customer care operation.

O: And companies like PG&E and Consumers Energy are a good way down that path already. What challenges should other utilities expect?

BR: The trick is to think about IT from the beginning. If each part of the business buys its own bespoke technology — for billing, demand response, energy efficiency, et cetera — then it probably won’t integrate easily. It’s hard to get it all into one platform. You can end up with crossed wires, and as a customer, the messages you get from your utility aren’t as coordinated and personalized as you expect.

That’s why executives need to loop their CIOs into the decision making process early on. Here are five steps for success.

All of these are tangible steps that any utility can take right away. If you do, your CIO will be thrilled. But more importantly, you’ll start getting bigger, better results out of your technology. And that’s a win for everyone.

We’re excited to announce that Opower’s second annual utility innovation summit, PowerUp, is now at capacity! And the three-day conference, taking place this February 17-19 in Miami, is just around the corner.

Opower co-founders Dan Yates and Alex Laskey welcoming attendees at PowerUp last year. They’ll do it again at PowerUp 2015 later this month.

Who’s on the guest list this year? More than 300 utility leaders, business executives, technology visionaries, and messaging experts from around the world. Together they’ll be tackling the industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities — including regulatory uncertainty, customer care challenges, and increased competition — and sharing perspectives on how ingenuity and technology can improve outcomes for utilities and their customers.

Whether you’ll be making it to PowerUp 2015 or not, here are 3 things you can do now to plug into the unique action and insights from the event:

Heather Anderson is a leading expert in residential demand response. As a manager at Baltimore Gas and Electric, she’s responsible for designing, implementing, and operating one of the world’s largest peak-time rebate programs. And she’s found incredible success: in just two summers, her program has helped BGE’s customers save more than $13 million on their energy bills.

In less than two weeks, Heather will share her story at PowerUp, our annual utility innovation summit. Here’s a sneak peek of what she’ll cover — plus some key takeaways in case you can’t make it to Miami.

Opower: You’re an industry leader in residential demand response, which is one reason why we’re so excited to have you on stage at PowerUp this year. What brought you to this point in your career? People jump into the utility industry from all kinds of paths, and we’re sure you have a good story to tell.

Heather Anderson: After earning a degree in marketing, I led product management and marketing at Provident Bank for over 15 years. Banks and electric utilities may seem different, but during my time in the banking industry it was undergoing similar challenges that utilities are facing today.

Not that long ago, banks were highly regional with limited to no online presence. This restricted the need and capability to communicate with and engage customers outside of traditional branches. The digitization of information enabled deeper customer engagement, satisfaction, and choice.

My responsibility was to develop and implement solutions and products that brought the bank into the 21st century by exceeding our customers’ increasing expectations for service and services, like online banking.

Today, utilities across the nation are facing similar trends. Digitization of energy information creates opportunities for new products and solutions, and deeper customer engagement.

At BGE, we are focused on translating energy information into real value for customers — in the form of efficiency and demand response — in order to build stronger, deeper customer relationships. In this role, I’m able to draw on much of my past experience in banking to design effective, innovative demand-side management programs that help customers save energy and money.

O: Data analytics are a big part of the utility industry’s future — but they’re also huge buzzwords right now. How is BGE using analytics to achieve real business outcomes?

HA: Data analytics only matter if you use them to yield outcomes. Using high-level analytics, you can know the hours of peak electric demand. But by using detailed data, you can create a customer’s baseline to provide them with a personalized incentive to decrease their use during peak times.

Information is most useful when you can translate it into action. At BGE, we are focused on delivering these insights to customers so they have a better experience, are able to make energy savings decisions, participate in our programs, and are more likely to save energy and money.

Messages are personalized — imagine an email or text message designed specifically for you, with your own data. This is a more compelling way to communicate than via a generic message with a menu of programs that may or may not be applicable to you.

This approach has worked well for BGE’s Smart Energy Rewards program, a peak-time rebate program. It’s saved customers nearly $13 million over the two summers since the program launched in 2013.

O: After a successful launch in 2013, BGE expanded Smart Energy Rewards to over 850,000 customers this year — and the initial results seem really strong. What’s your next step? Now that you’ve dramatically scaled your DR approach, what’s the next mountain for BGE to climb?

HA: After the successful launch of the BGE Smart Energy Rewards program in 2013, the next step is to fully deploy it in summer 2015 to 1 million customers who are eligible to participate. It will be one of the largest peak-time rebate programs, with very high participation and customer satisfaction. Our goal is to maintain and grow our results, and continue to provide customers with choices on how to participate in demand response programs.

At the same time, we are actively exploring pilots to learn and take advantage of new technologies, such as the use of Wi-Fi thermostats, to further integrate our energy efficiency and demand response programs. By integrating demand management, we can provide an enhanced and more consistent customer experience.

O: Let’s step outside the utility world for this last question. We’re obviously going to see you at PowerUp, and we’ve put together a packed agenda for our attendees. What part of the event are you looking forward to most?

HA: I am most looking forward to learning more about behavior programs from other utilities and other innovative approaches in the sunny backdrop of Miami.

Opower went public 10 months ago. And a lot has changed since then: we launched a new version of our platform, went live in Asia, and proved that behavioral demand response produces powerful results.

A lot has changed for our award-winning CFO, too. We sat down with Thomas Kramer this week to get his take on life after the IPO, trends in the industry, and what’s in store for tech companies in 2015.

How has your job changed since the IPO?

TK: Now that we’re public, I spend a lot more time chatting with investors. Our business is complex, and they need a deep understanding of what we do before they feel comfortable putting their capital to work with us.

Opower has seen some pretty remarkable growth over the past couple years. What’s one piece of advice you would give CFOs of other rapidly growing technology companies?

TK: It’s all about the fundamentals. Markets are fickle, but if you focus on building a great, sustainable business, you will eventually prevail.

Journalists have speculated that 2015 will be a banner year for tech IPOs. Are they right?

TK: While it’s hard to predict any particular IPO, it does seem like there’s a group of healthy, mature tech companies that could benefit from being public. With Box already out, and a host of successful companies considering making the plunge — AirBnB, Uber, Spotify and Pinterest among them — it does seem like the moment could be right.

From a CFO’s perspective, what’s the biggest trend you see for tech in 2015?

TK: I’ll start by naming a trend I don’t see for tech in 2015. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, recently predicted that the Internet will soon disappear: “There will be so many IP addresses… so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time.”

He was talking about the Internet of Things. I agree that it’s coming, but I think we’re years away from prime time.

Here are a couple real trends I think we’ll see. First, security will become front and center of enterprise and consumer apps. Second, “big data” for its own sake will become a thing of the past — because consumers don’t want raw data, they want personalized insights and actionable advice. Big data will be necessary, of course, but it won’t be enough.

Third, I think we’ll continue making secure computing accessible from just about everywhere. Now that incredible phones and tablets are ubiquitous, we’ll start seeing more apps that can deliver rich user experiences and solve real business problems anywhere.

What is one thing about your job that gets you out of bed in the morning?

TK: The people. Since my first day at Opower, I have always been blown away by the amazing talent we have working here. I am continually humbled by what I learn from my teammates.

Want to hear more from Thomas? Don’t miss the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s CXO Auction on February 4. You could win a one-on-one meeting with TK — and an exclusive chance to workshop your business pitch with one of America’s leading CFOs.

Thomas Kramer is responsible for financial management, human resources, and administrative stewardship at Opower. Previously, he was CFO at Cvent, the largest event-management technology company in the US, where he helped grow the organization from its founding to profitability and 850 employees, and where he led the largest software financing round in the US since 2007. Prior to joining Cvent, Thomas was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and a senior consultant at Accenture. He earned a Master’s at the Norwegian School of Economics, and an MBA at Harvard Business School, with a focus on strategy and finance.